All posts in category Science Fiction

1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t
sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

4. If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ¬memory stick.

5. Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

6. Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.)
But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark.
What ¬fascinates A will bore the pants off B.

7. You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality.
This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get
a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but -essentially you’re on your own.
Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

8. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that
first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage.
You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend
or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend
should not be someone with whom you have a ¬romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

9. Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace
your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person.
Change the tense. Change the opening page.

10. Prayer might work. Or reading ¬something else. Or a constant visualization of the
holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

Margaret Atwood, 1939

Margaret Atwood is an award winning Canadian writer of novels, poetry, essays, as well as a literary critic, and environmentalist. She is best known for speculative fiction novels, The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. She is also well known for claims that these novels were not science fiction and describing said genre as “talking squids in outer space.” which brought her much ire from the SciFi community.

Robert Heinlein, 1907 – 1988

Robert Heinlein was an American science fiction writer known as the Dean of Science Fiction Writers, a member of the Big Three of Science Fiction, and one of the most controversial writers of the time. Of his 32 novels, my personal favorites are Stranger in a Strange Land and Time Enough for Love, both dated and sexist but wonderful stories all the same.

Neil Gaiman, 1964-

Neil Gaiman is an award winning English author whose work crosses genres but is most know for fantasy and science fiction in a wide variety of formats, short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theater and films.The comic book series The Sandman, and novels Stardust, American Gods, and Coraline, are some his best known works.

Corrected version! Somehow rule #1 went missing. Sorry!

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was an American writer of speculative fiction. He was at master at combining satire, humor, and humanism. He is best known for Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions .